The Miracle of the Qur’an

How is the Qur'an a proof of the Prophethood of the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ)

In the struggle of Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) is another message for us, another sign, an awakening point for many of us who have lost contact with the Qur'an. It contains proof of the prophethood of Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) as he said:

‘All prophets were given something which would cause people to believe in them, the thing which I was given was none other than the revelation, the Qur'an, which Allah revealed to me (ﷺ) so I hope that I will have the most followers amongst them on the Day of Judgment’. [1]

Allah (سبحانهُ وتعالى) gave the prophets miracles to convince their people that they were in fact prophets of Gods. Because if somebody stands up and says ‘I’m a prophet of God,’ then what’s your proof? How do we know you are a prophet of God? There are so many false prophets around, so the miracles were given to them to prove to the people, those who were willing to open their hearts, that they were in fact prophets of God and what Allah did is that He chose miracles which were in the areas in that which the people excelled, so that the miracles would have a greater impact on them. So for example, Prophet Moses (عَلَيْهِ السَّلاَمُ), who was raised up in Egypt, Egypt was known for sorcery, magic. So he was given a miracle which was like what the magicians were doing, but it was greater. His staff when he threw on the ground it became a snake. Now the magicians of Egypt could do that too, but the thing is that they were doing a trick on the people, they were mesmerizing the people, people thought they saw these sticks as snakes, but they really weren’t, they just appeared to be moving, they threw them on the ground and they appeared that way to them whereas in the case of Musa (عَلَيْهِ السَّلاَمُ), when he threw the stick, it really became a snake and it ate up all the false snakes of the other magicians which is why they submitted. They prostrated to Allah (سبحانهُ وتعالى) immediately. They knew the truth when they saw it.

In the case of Prophet Jesus (عَلَيْهِ السَّلاَمُ), who was sent amongst the Jews, the Jews were known; even till today they are known, for medicine. The top medical experts around the world if you look at; see who they are, they are Jews, being the top medical experts puts you in a critical position. If you are a president, who is working against them, operations can easily fail, accidents happen, very very crucial position to be in. So they make sure the top heart surgeons, the top medical experts are from amongst themselves, crucial. So in those days of course the medical doctors were able to heal people who broke their arms, you know, who had eye diseases etc. They were able to do what appeared to the people who had no knowledge of the medicines or techniques as something almost miraculous. So Prophet Esa (عَلَيْهِ السَّلاَمُ) was given a miracle in the same area, except on another level, except for just fixing a broken bone, somebody who was born crippled, with a birth defect, he fixed, something which the Jewish doctors could not. People who were born blind, he made them see, Jewish doctors couldn’t do that. So he was on a whole another level. He even brought the dead back to life, that’s something definitely was not in their hands, people got sick, they got them well, but not somebody who is dead, is declared dead, coming back to life again.

So Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ), being the last Messenger of Allah, he (ﷺ) was also given miracles to prove to the people that he (ﷺ) was a Prophet of God. However, his (ﷺ) miracle had to be on yet another level, he (ﷺ) had miracles, which were on the similar level as the other prophets. When the Quraysh asked him (ﷺ) to show them a sign, he (ﷺ) pointed to the moon and the moon split in front of them, that was a miracle, but that type of miracle was not the main miracle of the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ). Why? Because he (ﷺ) was to be the last of the messengers, if somebody asked you, ‘Prove to me that Prophet Moses staff, his staff turned into a snake?’ Do we have the staff of Prophet Moses in a museum somewhere, turning into snake and back into a staff, do we have this anywhere, you heard about that? No nowhere, or if somebody said ‘Okay, prove to me that he split the Red Sea’, Do we have a marker somewhere in the Red Sea where we can see a split till today? No, okay if somebody says, ‘prove to me that the prophet Jesus made the dead come back to life.’ Do we have the dead man who he called back to life around so we can say he died and here he is or the blind who saw or the birds that he made from clay he blew on it and it flew away? Do we have any of those things? No. These are things that we believe in, similarly we believe in the moon, yes there is somebody who said, ‘yeah, you know when the first moon lander landed on the moon, the Americans, they were walking around they did find the crack in the middle of the moon.’ This is not true. This is Muslim fairy tales, right we're looking for.... you know the story, of one of the astronauts hearing the adhaan on the moon, nah, fairytales. Then he went to Egypt and he heard the same adhaan again and he became a Muslim. Not true. What was his name again? Neil Armstrong, because they called Neil Armstrong and he is still a Christian. He doesn’t, he had never heard any adhaan. It’s not true, widespread, you know like all these fishes that we find with scales saying Allah, we’re famous for this stuff right. May Allah protect us.

Anyway the point is that these miracles are not tangible. We cant hold them now, they happened at the time and they served that purpose, but Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) was to be the Prophet till the end of the world, he was a Prophet for all mankind, till the end of the world. So he had to have a miracle that had to last so people could say, ‘show me the miracle,’ you say, ‘here it is.’ He (ﷺ) had to have that, that was unique. So that miracle, his (ﷺ) main miracle as he (ﷺ) said, it was the Qur'an because what were the Arabs known for? Were they known for medicine? No. Were they known for magic? No. Technology? No. They were not known for any of these things, the only thing they were known for was poetry, prose, eloquence, they loved their literature and they had taken it up to such a height, they used to have yearly competitions where people would come from all over Arabia like rap artists, this one raps and that one raps, like this, they were saying these huge long poems; people would memorize these poems hearing it one time. They were heavy into this, their eloquence; they loved the word, the literary word. So Allah gave them the miracle right where they loved the most and He took the letters that they used to make up their lovely poetry and prose and He stuck it at the beginning of 14 of the chapters of the Qur'an, alif laam meem, ‘Ha! What’s this?’ Something that the Arabs never did. It was something outside of the normal, they never did this before, but it was to challenge them ‘see this same alif laam meem that you make all of those poems, that you love so much, so much that ten of them you have written on gold bars and hung it on the Ka'bah, you worship it, the muallaqat.’ They worship them, they worshipped their poetry, so Allah gave them Qaaf, it blew their minds, wow! Something which they could not imagine, literary eloquence at a level which was beyond their comprehension, it mesmerized them that’s why they said ‘he’s a magician, when you go by his (ﷺ) house, put your finger in your ears otherwise it will just catch you and you will just ahhh! Ashadu an la illaha il Allah, better put your finger in your ears.’

The point is that this literary miracle was so real that Allah (سبحانهُ وتعالى) challenged the Arabs: three levels of challenge, first level, if you don’t believe this is from Allah produce a Qur'an like it, they couldn’t do it. Okay you don’t believe this is from Allah, produce 10 chapters like it, okay they still couldn’t do it, okay, you don’t believe this is from Allah, produce one chapter like it and He repeated this verse in Mecca and Medina, ‘produce one chapter like it.’ Smallest chapter Al-Kawthar is only three lines, they still couldn’t do it and they tried it, they couldn’t do it. Now some people might say well what’s so magical or so miraculous about these 3 lines of poetry? Why because we look at it, most of us look at it from our various languages, when we read the Qur'an we read the Qur'an in our languages translated, translated meanings, so we read and we say, ‘you know I read this chapter of the Qur'an and I know other English writers who have written much better literary works than this, this is just mediocre stuff, I don’t see anything magical about it.’ Why? Because the miracle of the Qur'an is not in English or Urdu or Bengali or Somali, it is in Arabic. It's in Arabic, but even the Arabs today might not be able to grasp it, the common Arabs because they’ve lost touch with the language of the time when it was at its peak. So if for example a missionary and some brothers came to me and asked me about this, a missionary says to you, ‘if I produce a chapter like the Qur'an will you convert to Christianity?’ Most Muslims say ‘Ooohhhh, I don’t know, I don’t think I can do that.’ We hesitate. We should say ‘yes, I’m ready to convert to Christianity if you produce one chapter like it, Allah says you cannot, you produce one, I’m ready right now.’ Most of us wouldn’t do that, if that’s put in front of us, we say, ‘I'll have to think about that one.’ Why because we doubt, we doubt the miraculous literary nature of the Qur'an. We doubt it and as I said, the average Arab, he or she may not be able to grasp that miraculous nature. So if the missionaries put together something and they did, they put together a religious book called ‘Al-Furqan’, yeah, called ‘Al-Furqan’ and just as we begin with Bismillah hir Rahman hir Raheem, they have it beginning with bismi eesa maseehat attathleeth and the story of genesis is put into Arabic rhyme, poetry and if you were to read this to the average Arab who didn’t know, maybe bismi ees almaseeh they know, illahu tathleeth they might catch that one but if you read the rest of it where God is replaced with Allah just as Arabs in the Arabic translation of the Bible, they use Allah, they may hear some of these and say, ‘yeah that’s Qur'an’ and they may swear ‘yes, wallahi this is Qur'an’ because they are out of touch with that language. So the missionary will say, ‘well then, we’re able to do it.’ but how do we judge whether somebody has successfully imitated the Qur'an or not? Do we give it to the average person and ask him, ‘what do you think?’ Somebody who has some background in English literature could write a sonnet in the style of Shakespeare and show it to the average person who had read a few Shakespeare thing and they’ll say, ‘yeah, yeah, that’s Shakespeare, sounds just like him, Shakespeare,’ but if you gave it to a Shakespeare expert, they would say right away ‘no, that’s not Shakespeare.’ They could spot the mistakes. So it means that the only way that you could judge this would be to give it to a Arabic literature expert, who is of necessity in most cases, an Arab and in most cases Arabic literary experts are Muslims. They say, ‘ah, its biased! So how can we defend if your people are going to be judging, whether we did it or not, you’re not going to accept it any way, its biased.’ What else to do? If we are the experts who else can judge? The point is that the expert will tell you, ‘this is not of that standard why, because here are the weaknesses in it here, here, there and there, its weak from this point.’ They will identify it. So they will do it academically. They’re not just going to say, ‘no it's not, because we don’t feel like it is,’ they will give you the points, why not.

The non-Arab Arabs, Arabic experts, they will tell you for example, ‘In the Qur'an there are grammatical mistakes.’ Now Bahaullah, the founder of the Baha’is, he had a book called ‘Al Kitab al Aqdass,’ the holiest of books, this was his book of revelation in Arabic. However when knowledgeable Arabs looked at his writing they said, ‘hey, its filled with grammatical mistakes,’ because he wasn’t an Arab, he was a Persian. Right you know, so he wrote, he made mistakes so they said this is a new divine grammar. When the non-Muslim Arabist, there are mistakes in the Qur'an. They say ‘tilkal rusul, wa qala til rusul, what is this? Everybody knows, you pick up any book of Arabic grammar, it tells you that if you have a demonstrative pronoun, there are different forms, which must match the noun that it is governing in gender and number. So you only use tilka when you are referring to feminine nouns, you’ll not say tilkal kitab, you’ll say dhalikal kitab and when you’re dealing with plurals, you have ha ulaaee and ulaika, so what your supposed to have here is ulaika rusul not tilkal rusul. Okay this is, maybe, above some of your heads but the point is that Arabic grammar came from the Qur'an, so you cant go back to the Qur'an and say the Qur'an has mistakes. Those people who are experts in grammar will tell you, ‘yes, you can use tilka. It was used in ancient Arabic poetry. It was used in the Qur'an, it is used for special emphasis,’ but it is no longer in common use. After time passed, people focused on one element of the grammar and they left the other element for classical literature, that’s all, there’s no grammatical mistake in the Qur'an, not like Bahaullah, Bahaullah was telling something else. So when Bahaullah said in his Kitab al Aqdas, ‘if you don’t believe that this is from Allah produce one word like it.’ Hey come on! This is a joke, this is a joke. Nobody had to produce one word like it because you can pick the dictionary up and produce so many words like it. Its just a joke or like when Elijah Muhammad in America, we was a false prophet there by the name of Elijah Mohammad who taught that white people were devils and black people were Allahs, this was his teachings right, nonsense of course. He said ‘I challenge any white person to come up and prove that he isn’t a devil’ and of course no white person went up to Chicago and challenged him and said ‘see, I’m here to prove to you that I’m not a devil,’ so he said, ‘see none of them have come, they are devils.’

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